However… once they have expressed themselves, it’s quite allright drag them to court over it.

/Michael

        anon said:

I would rather have the retards pay than give up the iron clad freedom of the American press.

I disagree. I don’t see this as a freedom of the press issue. Freedom of the press and of speech and expression is about expressing views and information, but it is not a free pass on fraud and deceptive advertising.

This is a well established area. Selling one thing as something else is fraud. You can’t use deception to sell a product. Therefore, it I sell a product that goes on your fuel line and I say it will save you fuel, that is fraud and illegal. I also can’t sell a tool that is supposed jack up a four ton load when it can only support a half a ton. Again, this is deception and fraud.

We live in a day and age where there is no doubt that information is every bit as much a viable product as any kind of physical item. There’s no doubt about information being a tool in and of itself. Hence, I can’t sell you a product by lying about what it does or what it is even if it is only information.

For example: lets say I sell a compact disk for $100 and I advertise it as being a software product that enables you to create dynamic webpages or to consolidate financial data or something and the software does not do what I say it would, it is still fraud. The fact that I am selling only ones and zeros in a pattern on a disc does not change the fact that it is a tool that enables you to do something.

What Kevin Trudeau does is sell information. In his case it’s not software binaries or stock video footage or blueprints for a steam turbine, it’s text on paper in a book. He makes the following claim: if you have an illness you can be cured. The information contained within the book will enable you to cure the disease. The book is thus a tool which enables you to do something. This is a LIE. The book contains no such information that would enable anyone to cure an ailment.

There so goddamned many of them these days

Sorry, I didn’t mean snake oil in the literal sense. Mencken also applied the term to people like Huey Long and Mary Baker Eddy. A more current example of a more toxic form of snake oil in this case might be Jim Jones or David Koresh.

BTW, you might want to read this blog entry by Olivia Judson at the NY Times.
http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/cracking-the-spine-of-libel/?ref=science

        Joel Upchurch said:

By any chance are you going to get to Gary Null any time soon? I have a friend that thinks Null and Trudeau are great. It is very tiresome to listen to her going on about such obvious charlatans.

I didn’t reconize the name but a quick Google search found his site and I do think I may have seen this guy before, now that my memory is jarred. Boy, he’s got everything, doesn’t he? AIDS conspiracy, vaccines, Gulf War Syndrom and Depleted Uranium, Autism and chemicals etc etc.

I’m not so sure about that. For one thing, the people reached by this can be reached and made to see the light. There are people who bought his book and gave it horrible reviews for being full of crap. There are people who have come around. I don’t know how large a proportion will, but at least some.

Also, I’m not so sure that a more toxic brand would come in. The thing about most alternative medicine is that it is harmless in and of itself. It’s harmful in that it displaces real medicine, gets people thinking entirely wrong about how to take care of themselves and also scams their money, but nearly all of it is not directly harmful. If a product actually kills people or causes severe harm, that is about the only thing that will get authorities to step in and pull it. Also, it gets noticed and gets a lot of negative attention.

These snakeoil salesmen know how far to push things. Killing your clientele is not a good buisiness model, and murder is a lot easier to prosecute than deceptive advertising.